A wealthy businessman hires a famous filmmaker to help make a smash hit film in cinema-mocking comedy Official Competition. It’s a brilliant, ridiculous, and pitch-black skewering of artistic ego, says Amelia Berry.
Official Competition
So much of the power of film is in its ability to create convincing emotional reality from an elaborate Rube Goldberg setup of lights, lenses, sets, props, and people pretending to be other people. It’s no wonder then that this thin line between reality and artifice has long been a fascination of filmmakers from the actress-as-arch-manipulator of All About Eve, to whatever is going on in Nathan Fielder’s series The Rehearsal. Official Competition, from Argentinian directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, takes this tension and spins it out into a brilliant, ridiculous, and pitch-black skewering of artistic ego.
When Spanish pharmaceutical magnate Don Humberto (José Luis Gómez) turns eighty, he decides he wants to be remembered for more than just his wealth. To achieve this, he decides to finance a film, hiring eccentric Palme d’Or winning director Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz in a truly astonishing red wig) to adapt prestigious novel The Rivals, the tale of a bitter feud between two brothers. Brought on to star as the brothers are Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas), a big-shot Hollywood superstar with a chip on his shoulder about craft and process, and Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez), an esteemed theatre actor whose greatest dream is to turn down an Academy Award. Chaos ensues.
Focused mostly around Lola’s bizarre rehearsal exercises for the film (performing underneath a huge suspended rock, kissing passionately in front of three dozen microphones, etc.), Official Competition serves as an incredible showcase for the talent of its three leads. With career-best comic performances, Cruz, Banderas, and Martínez wring laughs from the most subtle looks and gestures. Later, as the relationship between Lola, Félix, and Iván develops into a fraught psychosexual triangle of one-upmanship and recrimination, their acting grounds the absurdity in real feeling and pathos. Cruz especially takes what is more or less a caricature and channels an authority and vulnerability that makes her utterly convincing.
Shot with a starkness and precision that brings to mind Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Duprat and Cohn let their shots linger for a long time, framing the characters against massive, empty architectural spaces. Likewise, gags, reveals, and feints in the plot are drawn out for maximum discomfort, taking an often goofy and light-hearted film to some unexpectedly dark places. Even the already minimalist score is used very sparingly. For some viewers, this lingering pace is sure to feel overstretched and slow, but for most, the sheer strength of the characters and performances will be enough to drive their enjoyment through to the sinister twists and turns the film ends on.
Really, it’s this willingness to shift tone so dramatically that takes Official Competition from being just another film about how actors and filmmakers are pompous and artificial, into something that really plays with reality and pretense in weird and compelling ways. Above everything else, it’s also just really funny, with details like Lola’s León Ferrari fighter-jet crucifixion wall art making you think there might be a joke or a wink in just about every detail. Certainly, an artsy Spanish-language satire about actors and filmmaking isn’t going to be for everyone, but with the chemistry of this cast, it’s hard not to recommend Official Competition.
